The Service Fails to Start: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion

During a recent deployment it was noticed that the DirSync and ADFS 2.0 servers were showing the following error in the Event log which stopped me from proceding with the installation

The Service Fails to Start: “The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion – Event ID 7000 – The response has taken longer than 30,000 milliseconds to respond.

Looking at various factors and elimating them was a tideous task such as:

Has the server enough resources – Yes

Any issues with DC’s – No

Any issues with Firewall’s/Proxy for internet connectivity – No

Any issues with the hypervisor – No

So based on this I stumbled across the following fix which allows you to increase the timeout:

Increase the default timeout value:

Start Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).

To change the value data for the ServicesPipeTimeout DWORD value to 60000 in the Control key, follow these steps:

Locate and then click the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet

Click the Control subkey

Right-click the ServicesPipeTimeout DWORD value, and then click Modify.

Click Decimal.

Type 60000, and then click OK.

If the ServicesPipeTimeout value is not available, add the new DWORD value, and then set its value data to 60000 in the Control key. To do so, follow these steps:

Locate and then click the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet

Click the Control subkey.

On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.

Type ServicesPipeTimeout, and then press ENTER.

Right-click the ServicesPipeTimeout DWORD value, and then click Modify.

Click Decimal.

Type a value of 60000, and then click OK.
The value is 60000 milliseconds and is equivalent to 60 seconds or to one minute.

Note This change does not take effect until the computer is restarted.

And viola as if by magic on the next pass no issues were observed. To date it would just seem that the server did not respond in a timely fashion and by increasing this gave us more time for it to succeed.